Published originally in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos in 1998; Revised
and Republished on March 31, 2013

Passing
Over from Death to Life

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The most solemn
week in the liturgical calendar of the Church is Holy Week. Astride
a donkey, the foal of an ass, Our Lord entered Jerusalem to the tumultuous
approval of the ever-fickle crowds. "Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest."
(Mt: 21:19) These words are contained in the Sanctus at the
end of the Preface and before the Roman Canon in every Mass.
The voices that uttered these words originally on the first Palm Sunday,
however, changed their tune in just five days. Most of those who were
greeting him so jubilantly on Palm Sunday cried out with great fierceness
for his Crucifixion on Good Friday.

If we are
honest with ourselves, we realize that there are times when we wax enthusiastically
about the Faith only to fall by the wayside when we are put to some
test that we believe is beyond our capacity to endure. The fickle crowd
on Palm Sunday represents us, who are ever ready to seek our own pleasure
and to rationalize it as being somehow consonant with being a disciple
of Our Lord. Indeed, our churches are filled on Palm Sunday and Easter
Sunday, but a lot of the people attend Mass on those days do not give
the Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday a thought. They, like many
of the people in Jerusalem on the first Good Friday, simply go about
their business, preparing to keep a pagan celebration of Easter, replete
with bunnies and eggs.

The true liturgical calendar of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church provides the faithful with nearly two full weeks of Passiontide,
starting with Passion Sunday, which was observed this year on Sunday, March 17. The four weeks of Lent and the first week of Passiontide that precede
Palm Sunday are meant to direct our minds and our hearts to a deeper
appreciation of the events of Holy Week, the week in which we passed
from death to life. Indeed, the various prayers contained in the Immemorial
Mass of Tradition recall the events of Holy Week throughout the year
by emphasizing consistently the horror of sin and the need to seek out
God's mercy so that it might go well for us when we die. [Consider for
example the Collect from the Ferial Mass of Friday of Passion Week,
the day on which is celebrated also the Feast of Seven Dolors of Our
Lady: "O Lord, fill our hearts with your grace so that we may avoid
sin through our voluntary penance. May we suffer here in this life rather
than be condemned to punishment in eternity. Through Our Lord Jesus
Christ, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the Holy Ghost, one God,
forever and ever. Amen." There is no equivalent prayer to be found
at any point in the liturgical year in the Latin editio typica
of the Novus Ordo Missae.] Our Lenten prayers and sacrifices,
which are meant to be intensified during Passiontide, are supposed to
lead us to a profound meditation on the sufferings Our Lord endured
in His Sacred Humanity because of our sins, our ingratitude, our indifference.
We know that our sins put us on the wrong side of the events of the
first Holy Week. In His ineffable mercy, Our Lord gives us the chance
during each Holy Week of our lives to be on the right side
of His Cross.

Holy Week is a time
of great seriousness. All other distractions, including birthday and
anniversary celebrations, should be put aside during this week of weeks.
Television, for those who have still not given this demonic contraption
up for good, should not be watched. All sporting events, including the
championship game of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's
Division I men's basketball tournament, and exhibition baseball games,should
be set aside. Nothing is more important than concentrating our entire
attention on what our sins did to Our Lord once in time, and what they
continue to do to His Mystical Body, Holy Mother Church, today. Holy
Week is a time for us to retreat from the world, a time of sobriety
in which we seek to participate as fully as we are capable of in the
annual commemoration of the events which fulfilled all of the promises
made to mankind prior to Our Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

As we know,
however, the world will continue to about its business during Holy Week.
All of that must fade into oblivion for us. We must put all of that
out of our mind's eyes. We should not participate in anything excessively
profane during Holy Week. Yes, we should fulfill the obligations of
our freely chosen states in life. We should do our work with abandon.
But we should do so while focusing our entire energy and attention on the
mysteries of our redemption, offering all of our daily sacrifices and
penances to Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as her consecrated
slaves to be dispensed of as she sees fit for the greater honor and
glory of the Blessed Trinity and for the greater good of souls. We must
enter into Holy Week by endeavoring to be holy--and that means we must
be as unspotted as possible by the world and all of its false attractions.

Spy Wednesday

Wednesday of Holy
Week is traditionally called "Spy Wednesday," the day on which
Judas Iscariot agreed to betray Our Lord for thirty pieces of silver.
Judas later repented of his crime, but despaired of being forgiven by
Our Lord, hanging himself to death. Judas is the symbol of treachery,
despair and hopelessness. It cannot be that way with us. For while most
of us have played our parts as Judas at one point or another in our
lives by having committed mortal sins, we know that Our Lord instituted
the Sacrament of Penance ("Whose sins you shall forgive, they are
forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained."
Jn. 20:23) to bring our souls back to life after we have killed them
by means of mortal sin. We have the promise of forgiveness if we approach
the Divine Physician in a spirit of sincere contrition for our sins
and with a firm purpose of amendment to sin no more. Spy Wednesday must
remind us of how many times we have been a traitor to Our Lord--and
how He has taken us back go generously by applying the merits of the
shedding of His Most Precious Blood to us in the confessional.

Maundy
Thursday: The Priesthood and the Eucharist

The New and Eternal
Covenant, ushered in by our definitive exodus from our enslavement to
the Devil, was instituted by Our Lord at the Last Supper, superseding
the Mosaic covenant (Novi et aeterni testamenti.) Our Lord,
the Moses, was about to lead the many through the desert into the Promised
Land of eternal life. He had been preparing throughout His Public Ministry
to celebrate the Last Supper with His Chosen Twelve. And it was there
that He instituted the sacerdotal priesthood and the Eucharist so that
every man in every age thereafter could be led to the Promised Land
whose gates He was about to reopen by His sacrifice to the Father in
Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Our Lord chose ordinary
men to be His Apostles nearly 2,000 years ago. He has continued to choose
ordinary men from that time to this, men who are never free from the
effects of Original and Actual Sin. He chose weak vessels of clay, however,
to demonstrate that His power is greater than their weakness, that He
is able to use flawed instruments to perform the most remarkable miracles
known in human history: the administration of the sacraments, including
the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the forgiveness in
the Sacrament of Penance of Mortal Sins committed after Baptism. He
chose ordinary men to use the ordinary elements of the earth to effect
the truly extraordinary in the souls of those entrusted to their pastoral
care unto eternity. Ordinary men. Ordinary words. Extraordinary results.

Think about
it: priests offer the unbloody re-presentation of the immolation of
the Word Who was made Flesh to the Father every day of their lives.
They utter simple words over simple elements of bread and wine, with
the Holy Ghost using the power of a priest's ordination to change those
elements into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ.

Yes, without priests
there would be no Eucharist. Souls would literally starve to death,
which is why those who have fallen away from the practice of the Faith
and those who are outside of the true Sheepfold of Christ are always
hungering for some novelty or another (and, yes, the hungering for novelty
does, sadly, describe many within the Church today, including ecclesiastical
officials, who have lost their way). Without priests there would be
no Mass, thus denying God the glory that is His due and denying grace
to the Church. Without priests there would be no possibility of adoring
Our Lord in His Real Presence, keeping company with Him anew just as
He asked of three of His first bishops when he agonized in the Garden
of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. Priests were empowered by Our
Lord to make all of this possible. This should fill us with amazement
and gratitude on Maundy Thursday, as well as each day of our lives.

Do we make
time in our daily schedules, whether in or out of Lent, to keep watch
with Him in His Real Presence? Do we encourage others to do so? Are
we resolved to keep company with Our Lord from the conclusion of the
Mass on the evening of Maundy Thursday to the time Our Lord is removed
from the tabernacle of reposition at midnight? Are we aware of the ancient
tradition of visiting seven churches during the period of reposition
on Maundy Thursday (a tradition, yes, that was still observed in Rome in its present state of occupation by the conciliar revolutionaries that have robbed Catholics of Our Lord's Real Presence, where I saw scores and scores of Romans walk from church to church on
the evening of Mandy Thursday in 1995 even though they, as was the case with me at the time, did not realize that Our Lord was not sacramentally present in those churches)? Sure, this is not possible today in most places in the world because of the conciliar revolution. We can, however, send our Guardian Angel to visit those churches for us!

The
Agony in the Garden

Although accompanied
by three of the first bishops, Our Lord endured His Agony in the Garden
alone. He knew full well what was about to happen: He was about to come
into contact in His Sacred Humanity with the very antithesis of His
Divinity, sin. The thought of this filled Him with dread. And
that is why He sweated droplets of Blood as He asked His Father to remove
the cup of suffering from which He was about to drink. He feared in
His Sacred Humanity of coming into contact with sin. Oh, how casually
and easily to do we sin? A thought to ponder, my friends.

There is no
agony any of us can go through which is the equal of what Our Lord endured
in the Garden of Gethsemane atop the Mount of Olives. His grace is sufficient
for us to endure our agonies in union with His. Therefore, we should
not grumble. Who are we to complain about bearing our share of the hardship
which the Gospel entails? We must remember that God is so merciful to
us: our sins deserve far worse than we actually suffer in this vale
of tears.

Oh, so much
happened on the night during which Our Lord entered into His fearful
Passion. The whole of the history of salvation was meant to lead up
to that very night. A night of celebration because of the institution
of the priesthood and the Eucharist. A night of dread because of the
coming Passion. A night of weariness, as Peter, James, and John, who
had witnessed the Transfiguration, could not stay awake as Our Lord
suffered His agony. A night of betrayal, because of Judas Iscariot.
A night of abandonment, because all but one of the newly-ordained bishops,
the Apostles, fled in fright when their Master was arrested. A night
of injustice, as the God-Man was faced with hypocrisy and false witnesses
from the very creatures He created--and was about to redeem on the Holy
Cross. A night of isolation, as the One Who was once the prisoner of
the tabernacle of Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb spent the
night in a Jerusalem jail, alone.

Good
Friday: Ite, Missa Est

The time we spend
with Our Lord's Real Presence after Holy Mass on Maundy Thursday prepares
us to commemorate the events of Good Friday with particular solemnity,
to recall His trial before the Sanhedrin, His crowning with thorns,
His scourging at the pillar, His condemnation by the crowd. Pontius
Pilate, seeking the path of expediency that was the subject of my introductory
commentary to this reflection, appeased the crowd by releasing to them
Barabbas, the one promising political liberation from the hated Romans.
The Jews of the Sanhedrin, motivated by our own sins, finally found
a place for the One Who had been denied a room in the Inn on the night
He was born, Calvary. He Who had been hailed as a hero five days before
was condemned with a particular ferocity by a vicious mob, a mob in
which our own voices were made loud and clear.

As is the
case today with politicians who should know better, Pontius Pilate listened
to the crowd. (Andrew Mark Cuomo, Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, Mario Matthew Cuomo, George Elmer Pataki, Rudolph William Giuliani, Richard Durbin, Thomas Ridge, Thomas Harkin, Robert Menendez, Susan Collins, Patricia Murray, John F. Kerry, Jack Reed and Mary Landrieu are just some of the latter day Pontius Pilates in our midst.) Political expediency is what served Pilate best. He sent Our
Lord away to bear His Holy Cross, washing his hands in a finger bowl
of His Blood. How many Pilates in both major organized crime families of naturalism do the
same today?

Pilate sent
Our Lord away to bear His Holy Cross. It was in His weakened condition
that He made His way to fulfill all that had been written of Him by
permitting sinful men to nail Him to a tree. Our Lord suffered the humiliation
of the Roman soldiers ripping off the only thing He owned, His robe,
and then throwing dice for it to see who should take it away. His Body
was lacerated with the wounds of the bone or metal tipped whips which
were used to scourge Him. The defilement of His Body is a representation
of the state of our souls as a result of our sins.

The King of
Kings spent three hours on His earthly throne, the Cross. The salvation
of mankind was won back for us on the wood of the tree of the Holy Cross,
just as our condemnation had come from the fruit of the wood of the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The New Adam, Christ, canceled
out the disobedience of the first Adam. And just He saw all of our sins
in the Agony in the Garden as He awaited His betrayal and arrest, so
did He see each one of our own sufferings, both physical and spiritual,
as He hung on the gibbet of the Holy Cross, making it possible for us
to unite those sufferings with His own if we offered them to Him through
the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother, who stood so valiantly
as our sins caused her Divine Son's suffering and death. He saw everything
about us. All of our own difficulties and pains. All of our sleepless
nights. Everything.

Born a sign
of contradiction. Died a sign of contradiction. Born in the wood of
a manger, a feeding trough for animals. Died on the wood of the Cross,
which has become for us the new feeding trough until the end of time.
He Who had existed from all eternity in His Divinity now tastes the
bitter pangs of death in His Sacred Humanity. But His dying destroyed
death. "O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?"

The earth
quaked, rocks split asunder, the curtain in the temple was torn in two
from top to bottom, signifying the end of obliteration of the Old Covenant
God had made with Moses. So great was the impact of sin upon the physical
Body of Our Lord that the earth itself shook violently. The greatest
act of violence in the history of mankind took place during those three
hours. He endured all of this out of love. He wants us, strengthened
and nourished by the Church He brought forth from His wounded side,
to endure our crosses for love of Him, to help make reparation for what
our sins did to Him once in time and what the do to His Mystical
Body today.

The Romans
were surprised to find out that it taken "only" three hours
for Our Lord to die; a man being crucified could take several days
to die, which is why crucifixion was feared throughout the Roman Empire.
Three hours seemed so fast to the Roman. The three hours spent by Our
Lord on the Holy Cross were, in reality, an eternity.

Yes, an eternity.
Those three hours transcended the boundaries of time and space. They
transcended 180 minutes and 7800 seconds. For it was during those three
hours that the God-Man not only paid back the blood debt of every sin
of every human being who would ever exist in time, He redeemed every
suffering of every human being who would ever exist in time, entrusting
His Holy Church with the duty to extend His Sacrifice in an unbloody
manner until the end of time so that individual souls could cooperate
with the graces He won by His perfect obedience to the Father's will
for love of Him and for love of us.

Our Lady and
the Cross

Our Lady watched
her Divine Son as He was scourged at the pillar. She watched as He was
condemned to death by the crowd. She watched as He carried His Cross,
made infinitely heavier than it was by the weight of our sins, on the
Via Dolorosa. She watched in silent agony as the sword of sorrow prophesied
by the aged Simeon at the Presentation pierced her Sorrowful and Immaculate
Heart as she stood so valiantly by the foot of the Cross of her Divine
Son for those three hours that seemed like an eternity. Any mother would
be in torment if she had to watch her son suffer. Mary, who loved her
Divine Son perfectly as she was conceived without any stain of Original
Sin, experienced a total communion of unspeakable sorrow in her Immaculate
Heart--which was truly the same plain as her Son's Most Sacred Heart.
After all, His Heart came from hers. His Blood came from hers. The very
Flesh, mangled and torn by the scourging, stripped of practically every
patch of skin when His tunic was removed, came from her flesh.

The late Monsignor
Roman Guardini was a precursor of the conciliar revolution in many ways. However, he did put things very well about how Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother suffered as one. Consider these words from Guardini's The Rosary of Our Lady:

"Every
breath the Lord drew passed through Mary's breast; every throb of His
heart was her own; and nothing happened to Him that had not also 'penetrated
her soul,' as Simeon foretold. So we must draw her into all of these
events.

"Mary connects
us with all these happenings. It is she who causes us not only to look
and meditate, but also makes us aware that all these happenings concern
every one of us, you and me. She is the reason that I do not run away
when my faintheartedness becomes unbearable, but that I remain. She
herself remained, 'until all was consummated.' And so must I." (Monsignor Romano Guardini, The Rosary of Our Lady.)

Our Lady,
the Mediatrix of all graces and the Co-Redemptrix, used those three
hours at the foot of her Divine Son's Cross to pray for sinners, which
means each one of us without exception, who imposed this cruelty upon
her Divine Son and herself. And she was given to us by Our Lord, her Divine Son, to be
our Mother when He entrusted the care of Saint John the Evangelist to her. And we were given to her to be her children by adoption. The
woman who brought forth her only Son painlessly in the stable in the
cave in Bethlehem brought us forth as adopted children of God in great
pain on the dung heap known as Calvary.

We were on the wrong
side of the Cross during those three hours nearly two millennia ago.
St. John the Evangelist took our place for us at the foot of the Cross
next to Our Lady and St. Mary Magdalene and a handful of others. Our
Lady wants us to keep her company at the foot of the Cross every day
by making the effort to assist at true offerings of the Holy Mass as frequently as we can, realizing once again that this may not be possible for most people in this time of apostasy and betrayal, making daily Mass an habitual part of our daily existence. Yes, this
might mean great sacrifices (perhaps requiring us to move from one part
of the country to another) for those of us who want to protect the integrity of the Faith by having nothing at all to do with the counterfeit church of conciliarism. However, what
sacrifice can we make that can even come close to matching that made
by Our Lady as the first Mass was consummated on Calvary? She wants
us to understand that every offering of Holy Mass by an alter Christus
acting in persona Christi transcends time, taking us back to
Calvary and providing us at the same time with a foretaste of the glories
of Heaven. For a faithful assistance at daily Mass will prepare us more
readily to bear our own crosses on a daily basis and thus be led by
Our Lady from our own "Calvaries" to our own empty tombs.

Our Lady beheld the
lifeless, dead Body her Son as He was taken down from the Cross, shedding
tears as she meditated on the souls for whom her Son had died in vain,
those who would not cooperate with the graces that He had just
won for them, those who refuse to accept the teaching that He was depositing
in His Holy Church for the sanctification and salvation of souls and
thus for the right ordering of societies and the world. She pleads constantly
for the conversion of sinners. She wants us to grieve her Immaculate
Heart no more by our persistence in sin and/or error, most of which
is the product of obstinate sin and an obstinate refusal to accept the
binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. And
she wants us to remember that we must keep her company during the forty
hours between her Son's burial in the borrowed tomb that had been hewn
out of stone by Joseph of Arimathea and His Resurrection from the dead
on Easter Sunday. The time of Passiontide is Mary's time. Let us never
forget that, praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of her Most Holy Rosary
over and over and over again during between Maundy Thursday and Easter
Sunday morning. Just as her Son is the New Adam, she is the New Eve,
the new Mother of the Living unto eternal life.

The
Triumph of the Empty Tomb

What appeared to be
an ignominious death turned out to be the defeat of the power of sin
and death forever. The One Who had been arrested as a criminal, charged
falsely by the Sanhedrin, spent a night in prison, was scourged at the
pillar, crowned with thorns, condemned by the crowd, judged by Pilate,
spat upon and vilified as he walked to His Crucifixion, an assigned
a grave among evil-doers spent forty hours in a borrowed tomb. Although
dead in His human nature, Our Lord went to the reaches of the netherworld
to free all of the souls of the just who had been awaiting His Redemptive
Act. The Gates of Heaven had been reopened. The Good Thief had company.
Souls of human beings were finally in Heaven.

The world,
however, thought that the Nazarene had been done away with. His Apostles
were hiding in fright out of fear of the Jews. Only a small band of
women had the courage to make their way on Easter Sunday morning to
the tomb in order to anoint Our Lord's Body. The sight of the empty
tomb startled them. And St. Mary Magdalene was astonished to see the
Master Himself tilling the ground as a gardener. You see, Adam tilled
the ground in the Garden of Eden. Our Lord wants to till the garden
of our souls. He told St. Mary Magdalene to go to the Apostles with
the news that He had risen from the dead as He had foretold. He had
fulfilled His own prophecy: "Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild
it in three days."

The Apostles did not
believe at first. Do we believe at all? Do we really understand
that the fact that there is an empty tomb in Jerusalem because Our Lord
got up from there and walked out on Easter Sunday morning is supposed
to define everything about us and our nations and the world?
Do we understand that the Cross and the empty tomb mean that we cannot
think or act as secularists, making no reference to these events and
One who accomplished them in public discourse? Do we understand that
nothing happens to us in this life matters one little bit (no suffering,
no misunderstanding, no injustice) if we die in a state of sanctifying
grace? Do we realize that there is no material success or failure which
defines our eternal destiny? Do we fear the deaths of our souls by means
of mortal sin rather than the death of our physical bodies? Do we believe
that we are destined to rise forth incorrupt and glorious on
the Last Day from our tombs if only we persevere until the point of
our deaths in a state of grace?

St. John the Evangelist
outran the first Pope, St. Peter, to the tomb after hearing news that
Our Lord's Body was not there. Out of deference to the Chief of the
Apostles, John did not enter the tomb until Peter had done so, although
he peered inside. They saw and believed. The words that the Lord had
spoken to them as they walked down Mount Tabor flashed through their
minds. "And as they came down from the mountain, He charged them
not to tell any man what things they had seen, till the Son of man shall
be risen again from the dead." (Mk. 9:8) He had risen! As Saint
Paul would note later, if Our Lord has not risen bodily from the dead,
then our faith is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men. The actual,
bodily Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ from dead is
a central fact of the Catholic Faith and anyone who dies this central
fact is not only a heretic but a demonic deceiver.

Our Lord showed
Himself to the Apostles in the same Upper Room where He had begun His
Passion. His risen and glorified Body still bore the brand marks of
the cruelty our sins had imposed upon Him. Indeed, those brand marks
remained on His Body once He had ascended to the Father's right hand
in glory on Ascension Thursday forty days later. There is no Easter
Sunday, no empty tomb, without the Cross. There is no way to know eternal
life unless we are willing to die to self as faithful sons and daughters
of the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation, just as
Our Lord died for love of us on the wood of the Cross. We must always
look to the Cross, the instrument of Our Lord's torture which He used
to effect our unmerited redemption.

An ancient
tradition of the Church teaches us that Our Lord was crucified on the
same date, March 25, that He had been conceived in Our Lady's virginal
and immaculate womb by the power of the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation.
No, this is not de fide dogma. However, it is worth giving
the matter a moment of thought. It does make perfect sense that Our
Lord would suffer and die on the same date that He became incarnate
to win back for us on the Tree of the Holy Cross what was lost for us
on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. No matter the date of
the first Good Friday, though, it is the case absolutely that Our Lord
appeared first to His Most Blessed Mother on Easter Sunday to console
her and to reward her with the fruit of their Easter victory over sin
and death. What a wonderful thing it is that Good Friday four years from now, that is, in 2016, will fall on March 25, the same date as it had in 2005/

There is symmetry
here. If we die in a state of Sanctifying Grace, we will be received into the bosom
of Our Lady, who will present us to her Divine Son once our souls have
been purified of all stain of sin in Purgatory if they are not so purified
at the moment of our deaths. We will see Our Lady before she presents
us to the Blessed Trinity to enjoy the glory of the Beatific Vision
for all eternity. It is thus essential to keep close to Our Lady to
make the best Holy Week of our lives. Let me repeat: it is essential
to keep close to Our Lady to make the best Holy Week of our lives. Our
Lord came into this world through Our Lady. We cannot return to Him
except through Our Lady, who wants to lead us after a life of repentance
as sons and daughters of the true Church her Divine Son founded upon
the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to an unending Easter Sunday of glory in
Paradise.

Our prayers
will be with each of you for a very solemn and blessed Holy Week,
culminating in our keeping of the Paschal Triduum of Maundy Thursday,
Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. Although I will have a
brief message to post on Easter Sunday (as it is liturgically inappropriate
to use the "A------a" word before the Easter Vigil Mass),
we hope and pray that the glory of the Easter season will help Catholics
worldwide to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true
Faith, working for the Social Reign of Christ the King as the fruit
of the Triumph of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Never become
anxious about the problems of the day, folks. Concerned, sure. Anxious,
no. The Church has survived Nero and Trajan and Diocletian and the Mohammedan
onslaughts and Henry VIII and Luther and Calvin and the French Revolutionaries
and the Bolsheviks and the Nazis and the Maoists and all of the petty
American politicians, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, who pound
their chests righteously as they put their thumbs in eye of the right
of Christ to reign as King in public life and for Our Lady to be recognized
publicly as our Queen. The final victory belongs to Our Lord and His
Most Blessed Mother. Never lose sight of this fact. And never lose sight
our the fact that Our Lord wants us to use our own fidelity as Catholics
to plant a few seeds for a new Christendom, remembering that the graces
He won for us on Calvary are just as powerful now as they were on Good
Friday.